Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

Google, and its parent company Alphabet, has its metaphorical fingers in a hundred different lucrative pies. To untold millions of users, though, "to Google" something has become a synonym for "search," the company's original business—a business that is now under investigation as more details about its inner workings come to light.

A coalition of attorneys general investigating Google's practices is expanding its probe to include the company's search business, CNBC reports while citing people familiar with the matter.

Attorneys general for almost every state teamed up in September to launch a joint antitrust probe into Google. The investigation is being led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said last month that the probe would first focus on the company's advertising business, which continues to dominate the online advertising sector.

Paxton said at the time, however, that he'd willingly take the investigation in new directions if circumstances called for it, telling the Washington Post, "If we end up learning things that lead us in other directions, we’ll certainly bring those back to the states and talk about whether we expand into other areas."

Why search?

Google's decades-long dominance in the search market may not be quite as organic as the company has alluded, according to The Wall Street Journal, which published a lengthy report today delving into the way Google's black-box search process actually works.

Google's increasingly hands-on approach to search results, which has taken a sharp upturn since 2016, "marks a shift from its founding philosophy of 'organizing the world's information' to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear," the WSJ writes.

Some of that manipulation comes from very human hands, sources told the paper in more than 100 interviews. Employees and contractors have "evaluated" search results for effectiveness and quality, among other factors, and promoted certain results to the top of the virtual heap as a result.

One former contractor the WSJ spoke with described down-voting any search results that read like a "how-to manual" for queries relating to suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline came up as the top result. According to the contractor, Google soon after put out a message to the contracting firm that the Lifeline should be marked as the top result for all searches relating to suicide so that the company algorithms would adjust to consider it the top result.

Or in another instance, sources told the WSJ, employees made a conscious choice for how to handle anti-vax messaging:

One of the first hot-button issues surfaced in 2015, according to people familiar with the matter, when some employees complained that a search for “how do vaccines cause autism” delivered misinformation through sites that oppose vaccinations.

At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should “let the algorithms decide” what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.com—which states on its home page in large black letters, “They f—ing don’t.” (The phrase has become a meme within Google.)

The algorithms governing Google's auto-complete and suggestion functions are also heavily subject to review, the sources said. Google says publicly it doesn't allow for predictions related to "harassment, bullying, threats, inappropriate sexualization, or predictions that expose private or sensitive information," and that policy's not new. The engineer who created the auto-complete function in 2004 gave an example using Britney Spears, who at the time was making more headlines for her marriages than for her music.

The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of horrible," he added.